Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: Information Networks and Intersubjective Reality
Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus arrives at a strange hour. We wake up, touch a glass rectangle, and enter a world where prices, elections, wars, reputations, friendship, markets, scandals, and public panic travel through the same narrow channels. A notification can move a stock. A rumor can become a crowd. A synthetic image can injure a person before breakfast. The old village square has not disappeared. It has been compressed, accelerated, monetized, and placed in the pocket.
The readers of information networks know this already in their bones. The problem is not that we lack information. The problem is that we increasingly lack the social conditions under which information can become judgment. This is where Harari’s idea of intersubjective reality becomes more than a clever anthropological term. It becomes a diagnosis of our age. We do not live only among stones, trees, bodies, hunger, and weather. We live among shared agreements that become stronger than stone once enough people behave as if they are real.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, published in 2024, extends a line of thought that made Harari famous in Sapiens. Human beings conquered the planet not because each person was individually wiser than other animals, but because humans learned to cooperate in enormous numbers through stories. Money works because people trust its story. Nations work because strangers accept the same symbols. Law works because courts, police, schools, documents, and ordinary habits keep treating it as binding. Intersubjective reality is the invisible agreement that becomes visible as power.
The scandal of reality is that much of it is maintained by agreement
Harari’s distinction between objective, subjective, and intersubjective reality is useful because it cuts through a lazy quarrel. Some things exist whether anyone believes in them. A virus, a mountain, and gravity do not need a public relations department. Some things exist inside an individual experience. Pain, fear, grief, and memory can be intensely real without being publicly transferable in full.
Then there is the third zone. A corporation does not exist like a mountain, and it does not exist like a headache. It exists because laws, banks, workers, customers, regulators, courts, and databases coordinate around its name. Its existence can hire people, sue people, pollute rivers, sponsor museums, influence elections, and vanish through bankruptcy. That is not a small illusion. It is a social fact with teeth.
Harari’s great talent is to make this third zone legible. He reminds us that modern life is packed with entities that no one can touch but everyone must obey. A passport, a credit score, a university degree, a national border, a brand, an algorithmic ranking, a central bank announcement: each belongs to a realm where belief and institution clasp hands. The result is not fantasy. It is organized consequences.
This is why the phrase “shared fiction” can mislead if handled carelessly. Fiction does not mean trivial falsehood. It means a story that coordinates behavior. The dignity of a person, the value of a currency, the authority of a constitution, and the legitimacy of a court all depend on collective recognition. Without that recognition, the document remains paper, the uniform becomes costume, and the seal becomes ink.
The danger begins when we forget the human labor required to maintain these realities. We start treating them as nature. The market wants this. The nation demands that. The algorithm decided. The economy reacted. These phrases sound neutral, but they smuggle human decisions into the grammar of inevitability. A society becomes less free when its own agreements return to it disguised as fate.
Nexus turns information from a tool into a political condition
The title of Harari’s book matters. A nexus is not just a connection; it is a binding point. It gathers lines of force. In Nexus, information is not treated as a clean substance that automatically produces truth. Information connects people, but connection alone does not guarantee wisdom. A mob is connected. A bureaucracy is connected. A conspiracy network is connected. A surveillance system is connected. The moral question is not whether information flows, but what kind of order the flow sustains.
This is the necessary correction to one of the most stubborn myths of the digital age. We were told that more information would naturally weaken tyranny, ignorance, and prejudice. If everyone could speak, truth would rise. If everything could be searched, manipulation would retreat. If networks became open, power would become transparent. It was a beautiful dream. It was also a dream that underestimated power’s appetite for adaptation.
Information networks do not merely transmit messages. They select, rank, repeat, reward, and forget. They decide which claim becomes visible, which outrage becomes profitable, which person becomes credible, which pain becomes statistical noise. In the age of AI, this selection no longer requires a human editor at every gate. Automated systems can generate content, classify desire, predict attention, and tune emotional weather with a precision earlier propaganda machines could only envy.
Harari is at his strongest when he refuses technological innocence. Technology does not float above society like a cloud of pure possibility. It enters a world already divided by wealth, state power, corporate control, racial hierarchy, gendered exposure, and unequal vulnerability. The same information system that offers convenience to one group may impose scrutiny on another. The same ranking system that helps a consumer choose may make a worker disappear. The same AI that drafts a memo may generate a false intimacy between machine fluency and human trust.
Here the concept of intersubjective reality becomes sharper. If humans have always lived inside shared stories, then AI does not invent the problem of collective illusion. It industrializes it. It can produce persuasive fragments at a scale no priesthood, ministry, advertising agency, or party newspaper could sustain alone. It can flood the public field with plausible speech. And when everything sounds plausible, the exhausted citizen may stop asking what is true and ask only what feels usable.
The old myths wore crowns; the new myths wear interfaces
Traditional authority was often theatrical. It needed ceremony, costume, architecture, anthem, oath, and procession. Power wanted to be seen. The king’s body, the courtroom’s ritual, the flag’s choreography, the pulpit’s height: these forms taught people where to place reverence. Modern information power is more modest in appearance and more intimate in reach. It often arrives as a menu, a feed, a recommendation, a score, a ranking, a prompt.
This change should not be romanticized. The older myths were frequently violent. They excluded women, colonized peoples, lower classes, religious minorities, and dissidents while presenting hierarchy as cosmic order. Yet the newer myths come with their own danger. They do not always command us from above. They organize the environment in which our choices appear. The command becomes the default setting. The ideology becomes the user experience.
Consider money. Harari often uses money as an example of intersubjective reality because it is both imaginary and brutally effective. A banknote, a coin, or a digital balance has value because a network of trust surrounds it. But in digital capitalism, money is joined by reputation metrics, platform ratings, engagement counts, and data profiles. These numbers can feel objective because they appear numerical. Yet they are born from designed systems, commercial priorities, and institutional decisions.
A person with five stars is not morally superior to a person with four. A trending topic is not automatically important. A credit score is not a complete account of character. A search result is not the natural order of knowledge. Still, these signals shape access to work, housing, attention, and dignity. The invisible agreement hardens into practical destiny. That is why the politics of information is also the politics of whose reality gets certified.
Harari’s argument helps us understand why contemporary conflicts over misinformation feel so ferocious. People are not only disagreeing over isolated claims. They are fighting over the institutions that authorize reality. Who has the right to say what happened? The court, the archive, the platform, the scientist, the government, the influencer, the crowd, the machine? Once that question becomes unstable, society does not merely argue. It trembles.
Harari’s strength is also his risk
A fair reading must also recognize the limits of Harari’s method. His wide historical sweep gives readers a powerful pattern, but patterns can become too smooth. The move from ancient myth to modern bureaucracy to AI may illuminate continuity, yet it can blur the different textures of exploitation, resistance, and local memory. Not every shared story works in the same way. The story told by a colonizer and the story preserved by the colonized are not equal just because both are intersubjective.
This matters politically. If all large orders depend on shared narratives, one may be tempted to flatten emancipation and domination into the same category of fiction. Human rights are imagined, yes. So is racial hierarchy. Democracy is imagined. So is caste. But their ethical force is not equivalent. Some shared realities expand the space in which vulnerable lives can breathe. Others tighten the room until breathing itself becomes a privilege.
Harari sometimes invites criticism because his language of fiction can sound too cool for wounds that remain warm. A dispossessed community does not experience a border, a police file, or a debt contract as a philosophical curiosity. It experiences them as pressure on the body. A concept becomes honest only when it remembers the bodies that pay the cost of collective belief.
Still, this is not a reason to abandon Harari’s concept. It is a reason to radicalize it ethically. If intersubjective reality is made, then it can be remade. If institutions depend on recognition, then recognition can be contested. If information networks coordinate belief, then democratic societies must fight not only for free expression but for trustworthy public conditions: education, independent courts, transparent institutions, accountable platforms, and time for citizens to think without being hunted by the next alert.
The practical question is not how to escape stories, but how to govern them
No human society can live without shared stories. The fantasy of a purely objective politics, cleansed of symbol, loyalty, memory, and aspiration, is itself a story. The issue is whether our stories can be made answerable to suffering. Can a nation remember those it excluded? Can a market be forced to count lives it would prefer to discount? Can a platform be made responsible for the realities it amplifies? Can AI systems be governed before their outputs become the common weather of perception?
The first practice is linguistic suspicion. Whenever an institution speaks as if no one chose anything, slow down. The budget was not cut by gravity. The platform did not recommend by destiny. The public did not polarize by magic. Decisions were made, incentives were installed, risks were shifted, profits were protected. Naming those choices is not cynicism. It is citizenship.
The second practice is institutional patience. In an age addicted to instant visibility, slow verification looks old-fashioned. Good. Some old-fashioned habits deserve a comeback. Archives, peer review, investigative procedures, public hearings, libraries, courts, and schools are imperfect, sometimes captured, often slow. But a society that destroys every mediating institution in the name of immediacy will soon discover that immediacy is the favorite climate of manipulation.
The third practice is solidarity with those who are forced to live under classifications they did not design. Data systems often become most cruel where people have least power to appeal. Migrants, welfare recipients, indebted households, precarious workers, children, prisoners, and racialized communities frequently meet the information order not as convenience but as judgment. If shared reality is being automated, justice requires that the weakest receive not pity but procedural power.
The future of intersubjective reality will not be decided by information alone. It will be decided by who designs the networks, who audits them, who profits from them, and who is allowed to challenge their verdicts.
The reality we share must remain revisable
Harari’s Nexus is most valuable when it pushes us past the childish belief that information is automatically liberating. Information can enlighten, but it can also coordinate obedience. It can connect strangers, but it can also train them to fear one another. It can reveal patterns, but it can also bury responsibility under dashboards and probabilities.
The question before us is therefore severe and intimate. We are not merely building smarter machines. We are building new environments in which human beings will learn what to trust, whom to fear, what to desire, and which realities to obey. That is why the argument about AI cannot be left to engineers, investors, and regulators alone. It belongs to citizens, teachers, workers, parents, artists, judges, and all those whose lives are increasingly translated into data before they are heard as speech.
Harari reminds us that humans became powerful by believing together. Our task now is to become responsible by doubting together. A shared reality worthy of human dignity must never become so efficient that no one can revise it, so persuasive that no one can question it, or so automated that no one can answer for it.
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